David T. Lewis wrote:
Actually, I would not mind putting some time into this if there was a way to organize the work such that any changes I identified could be properly vetted.
If you can keep the changes in reasonably small chunks, I think this would be doable. Just try to avoid the one-size-fixes-all approach of throwing several hundred changed methods at a single point in time.
I recently came up with a way to browse generated C and inlined C code in Squeak (*), which makes the problem seem considerably less intimidating. I've also done the 64 bit updates for some plugins (OSPP et al), so I have a passing familiarity with the issues.
I doubt that looking at the generated code will help much in general unless you can find a way to run gcc over these methods and have it show us directly the things it doesn't like. As a matter of fact, I think a non-inlined VM would be a much better starting point since it will only report each problem once and not every time it trips over an inlined variant.
Cheers, - Andreas